Goldman Sachs announced Friday the “launch of Datonomy, a new categorization system for the digital assets market,” in partnership with global index provider MSCI and crypto data business Coin Metrics. The announcement is as follows:
The new methodology for digital asset categorization is intended to enable investors, service providers, developers, and researchers track market trends, estimate portfolio risk and returns, and create new products.
“Delivered as a new data service, Datonomy classifies coins and tokens based on how they are used,” the investment bank noted, adding that the new system is available as a direct data subscription feed from Goldman Sachs, MSCI, and Coin Metrics.
Datonomy, for example, categorizes digital currencies into Value Transfer Coins and Specialized Coins. The latter is further separated into Meme Coins, Privacy Coins, and Remittance Coins.
Datonomy includes digital asset applications such as decentralized finance (defi) and Metaverse. Defi applications are classified as Decentralized Exchanges, Derivatives Trading, Decentralized Lending, Stablecoin Issuers, Prediction Markets, Asset Management, Crowdfunding, and Insurance. Virtual Worlds, Gaming, and Non-Fungible (NFT) Ecosystems are the three types of Metaverse applications.
Goldman Sachs added:
This new classification system for digital assets aims to provide market participants with a consistent view of the market, allowing them to track trends across different industries, such as smart contract platforms and decentralized finance, screen assets using a variety of different filters based on their objectives, and understand aggregated properties of these assets at the portfolio level.
MSCI’s global head of derivatives licensing and thematic indexes, Stéphane Mattatia, said, “We strongly think a uniform and standardized framework for the categorization of digital assets is crucial to enhance investors’ capacity to appraise the market.”
Anne Marie Darling, Goldman Sachs’ Director of Marquee Client Strategy and Distribution, told CNBC:
The digital asset ecosystem has grown significantly in recent years… We’re attempting to provide a framework for the digital asset ecosystem that our customers can grasp, since they increasingly need to include performance monitoring and risk management in digital assets.
In May of last year, Goldman Sachs established a cryptocurrency trading unit. In March of this year, the business completed its first OTC crypto transaction, a bitcoin non-deliverable option (NDO). In April, the bank made its first bitcoin-backed loan
